Tracking what a person eats in a more automated way, through the combination of visual recognition, voice recognition, GPS information, mechanical turk, data feed integration, and a simplified user interface, could revolutionize the awareness of people, improving the consistency with which more of us understand how and what we eat. The significance and magnitude of health issues related to nutrition and other health behaviors are now, relatively well known. Caloric over-consumption, poor nutritional balance and lack of physical activity are primary drivers of negative health outcomes in modernized nations. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says these behaviors together were the #2 ‘actual cause of death’ in 2000 (365,000 deaths, 15.2% of total), narrowly behind smoking; these behaviors far outpace alcohol, infection, toxins, accidents, firearms, unsafe sexual behavior and illicit drug use as causes of death. Poor diet and physical inactivity are major contributors to obesity, which may have cost the United States as much as $78.5 B in direct medical expenses in 1998 (1998 dollars), nearly 10% of healthcare spending, not including indirect expenses. Obesity is expected to halt American's rise in life expectancy in the first half of this century. Even today, US life expectancy is ranked only 45th (30th among UN member nations) in the world (78.06 years at birth), despite spending the most on healthcare in total ($1.5 T or 14.9% GDP in 2003; $3.7 T expected by 2013) 10 and per capita ($4887). Poor diet, physical activity, and obesity itself, are all risk factors for the development of cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, among other chronic conditions. In 2005, cancer and chronic disease accounted for approximately 70% of the giant US healthcare price tag, with cardiovascular disease accounting for 17%, cancers for 7% and diabetes for 4% (obesity not listed separately). In a separate US study on 2005 data, 44% of people surveyed had at least one chronic disease, and individual out-of-pocket spending went up 39% to an average of $741/year.
We see accurate, consistent and widely adopted health behavior tracking and planning as critical to individual and cultural awareness building for adoption healthy behaviors; understanding what one eats or how they engage in consistent physical activity, will be fundamental to overcome obesity and chronic disease. It is desirable to provide tracking tools to help overcome these health challenges.
Existing tracking systems/products do not allow a user to capture food images and provide automated and non-human annotation services to help codify the data. Further, few of the currently available tools have dramatically altered behavior or clinical outcomes on a population level, though a recent study showed 58% of patients across age groups look up health information on the web currently. A number of web-based tools and some simple mobile applications exist in the marketplace to help people to plan a diet, or an exercise routine, typically from the perspective of helping people to lose weight. The commercial argument for the obesity emphasis is that a fraction of the large population of overweight patients are contemplating change or already motivated (in Preparation stage) to lose weight for health reasons or aesthetics. Most use subscription models for which motivated consumers are willing to pay, and a few rely on advertising revenue.
But, no effective tools have been developed to accurately help people quantitatively, accurately and consistently track their dietary intake, which people are also pleased to use on an ongoing basis. Self-report food frequency questionnaires are notoriously inaccurate, and food journals are accurate if items are tracked at the time of consumption, but very few people will continue to take the time or even want to focus on this level of detail about what they eat, for more than a period of a couple of weeks. It is desirable to provide a product/system that addresses these issues.
Caloric overconsumption, lack of physical activity and inadequate sleep are three of the primary drivers of negative health outcomes in modernized nations. All three contribute to obesity, which cost the United States between 70 and 100 billion dollars in direct medical costs alone, and is expected to halt American's rise in life expectancy in the first half of this century. Obesity and each of these three health habits are risk factors for the development of heart disease, cancer, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and osteoporosis, among other conditions. Unfortunately, recommendations to be active, eat smart and sleep well are typically impersonal, generic, non-actionable, incompatible with daily commitments, unnecessarily expensive, easily forgotten and are far less frequent than competing messages promoting unhealthy nutrition and sedentary activities. Further, the availability of affordable and comprehensive services that promote long-lasting changes in behavior and body weight is low, creating a need for innovative solutions.
Thus, it is desirable to provide a system and method for automated personalized and community-specific eating and activity planning, linked to tracking with automated multimodal item identification and size estimation that overcomes the limitations of the above existing systems and method and it is to this end that the disclosure is directed.